When scientists talk about the cryosphere, they mean the places on Earth where water is in its solid form, frozen into ice or snow. Read more ...

Service Interruption

On Friday, 06 February 2015 from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. (USA Mountain Time), we will be performing scheduled maintenance, which may cause temporary disruptions to our Web site, applications, and FTP. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.

This data set contains line-based radar-derived ice thickness and bed elevation data, collected as part of the Airborne Geophysical Survey of the Amundsen Embayment (AGASEA) expedition, which took place over Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica from 2004 to 2005.

3. Data Access and Tools

Data Access

Software and Tools

Data are readable using standard spreadsheet software.

4. Data Acquisition and Processing

The AGASEA survey was conducted using a Twin Otter C-FSJB aircraft equipped with radar, laser, magnetometers, and a gravimeter. AGASEA is described in detail in Holt, et. al., 2006. The aircraft operated from two camps, one to the south of Thwaites Glacier, and one to the East, near Pine Island Glacier, with a range of 1000 km. Seventy-five flights were conducted over 50 days.

Data Acquisition Methods

Data were acquired using the High Capacity Radar Sounder (HiCARS) coherent ice penetrating radar delveloped by the University of Texas Institute of Geophysics. The radar antennas were mounted as dipoles under each wing. The radar had operated with a 60 MHz center frequency and 15 MHz of bandwidth, and used a 8 kW transmitter with a 1 μsec FM chirp and a pulse repetition frequency of 6400 Hz.

The across track beam width is controlled by the antenna beam pattern, and has a main cross-track half-power beam width of 12 degrees, and side lobes at ±22 degrees. The data were down converted to a 10 MHz center frequency, and recorded on two gain offset channels sampled at 50 MHz. Total dynamic range between the 2 channels is 90 dB. These data were coherently stacked 32 times to provide 16-bit 3200 sample coherent records at 200 Hz. In post processing, the data were range compressed with a synthetic chirp, and a 10 MHz coherent system noise was removed.

Processing Steps

In this data set, two further forms of post processing were applied. In primary processing, (1-D focused SAR or "foc1"), in the frequency domain, matched correlation filters derived from GPS trajectories and surface range measurements were used to focus the data in the along track direction (Peters et al, 2007). These data were resampled to 4 Hz along track, converted to amplitude from complex data, and logarithmically scaled for interpretation. The effective beam width was approximately 10 meters on the bed.

The second form of processing ("pik1") was used where good GPS solutions were missing, or issues with aircraft recording prevented focusing. The data was coherently stacked, converted to amplitudes and incoherently stacked 5 times to yield a 4 Hz sampling of the along track data. Given an average aircraft velocity of 70 meters per second this yields a effective coherent aperture of 14 meters and an along-track half-power beam width of 10 degrees. These beam widths illuminate a patch on the bed (at 800 meters above the surface and 2000 meters ice thickness) of 414 meters along track and 920 meters across track (in the main and secondary lobe). For similar conditions the pulse limited footprint is 390 meters.

Once processed, the data were interpreted by a team of undergraduate research assistants, who defined bounds about the bed and surface returns in the high and low gain channels respectively. The closest return to the aircraft was selected for the bed. Between the bounds, the brightest echo with a parabolic intensity profile was automatically detected. No adjustment at cross overs was applied, to preserve the integrity of the error statistics along the full length of the line.

Error Sources

Strictly speaking, what was obtained for each point along the transect was the range between the closest part of the bed over a ~2 km swath and the aircraft. Cross over differences between orthogonal lines are high over mountainous regions to the west and south (~150 meters) and low over the central catchment (~33 meters). The primary cause of these differences is cross track topography. The cross over differences for the entire foc1 data set are 102 meters, implying an uncertainty of 72 meters.